Is baseball's PED situation improving?

Brewers left fielder Ryan Braun reacts during his at bat against the Padres at Petco Park. (Christopher Hanewinckel / USA TODAY Sports)

Harsher penalties needed

Dom Amore

Hartford Courant

It is true that the number of players caught up in the Biogenesis scandal suggests that progress is being made, that players cheating are being caught. So the system works, right?

But there is also bad news: There are still too many players trying to get away with it, and if this many are being caught, how many others are not?

Before the game can truly be cleaned up, harsher punishments need to be in place. Longer suspensions, maybe lifetime bans, would help, but even a lifetime ban might not phase a player making millions. What baseball needs is a union-blessed change in the basic language of contracts, allowing teams, or MLB, to void them under these circumstances. Then the risk would be far greater than the reward.

The tone of player reaction to PED use is headed in a new direction. The peer outrage directed at Ryan Braun this week was simply not part of the discussion when drug scandals enveloped past baseball greats. Even the curmudgeonly Barry Bonds was revered more than ripped by fellow players.

But will outrage change the underlying behavior, and the answer to that is far murkier. Consider the Olympics. When Ben Johnson lost his 100-meter gold medal in 1988, fellow sprinters such as Carl Lewis lashed out at the prevailing drug culture. Just last week, top American sprinter Tyson Gay tested positive for a banned substance.

It will take more than outrage to eliminate the incentives that drive athletes to dope.

Nobody hates PED cheats more than clean athletes. A vast majority of major league players fit that description.

The worm turned in baseball 10 years ago, when MLB belatedly got players to agree to testing, and the efforts made in commissioning the Mitchell Report and then building its own investigative unit, and it's showing up.

Some guys are always going to cheat and the stories will always generate a lot of discussion. But that's athletics in this century, not an issue limited to MLB.

Any baseball players who still think they can beat the system like Marion Jones, Lance Armstrong and Barry Bonds did haven't been paying attention.

Would you want to walk into work every day, knowing that you might have to submit a urine sample to prove you did not do something wrong, when there was no evidence you ever did? Who would have access to those test results?

There were legitimate reasons for the players and their union to be wary. Congress prodded the union into agreement on a drug policy and the players finally had the evidence to see the game had been infested by steroids.

From then on, players have understood that public interest in a clean game must take a greater priority than workplace privacy issues. The near-universal cry today of players that want performance-enhancing drugs out of the game reflects that understanding.